San Diego Supercomputer Center

Scientific workflow systems promote scientific discovery by supporting the scientific workflow design and execution. They can be instrumented to capture provenance (execution history) of workflows and related data. The provenance contains information about how products were derived, and is crucial for enabling scientists to easily understand, reproduce, and verify scientific results. Currently, most provenance systems are designed to capture and query provenance for a single workflow run mostly by a single user. However, a scientific discovery is often a result of methodical execution of many interrelated scientific workflows, where workflows and datasets published by one set of users are used by other users to perform subsequent analyses, leading to implicit or explicit collaboration.

This presentation introduces a new collaborative provenance model which addresses the need for inferring dependencies across multiple workflow runs and understanding user collaborations. This data model for ``collaborative provenance'' that extends common workflow provenance models by introducing attributes for characterizing the nature of user collaborations as well as their strength (or weight). We also provide some example collaborative provenance scenarios and collaborative provenance queries using a combined bioinformatics workflow usecase.

Short Bio:

Ilkay Altintas is the Director for the Scientific Workflow Automation Technologies Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD where she also is the Deputy Coordinator for Research. She currently works on different aspects of scientific workflows in collaboration with the DOE Scientific Data Management Center and various cross-disciplinary NSF projects. She is a co-initiator of and an active contributor to the open-source Kepler Scientific Workflow System, and the co-author of publications related to scientific workflows, data provenance, conceptual data querying, and software modeling. Ilkay Altintas holds BS and MS degrees in Computer Engineering, both from Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and is an external PhD student of Computational Science at University of Amsterdam, working with Prof. P.M.A. Sloot, expected to graduate in February 2011.